British Airways and Indonesia’s Lion Air said on Wednesday they would halt all flights to mainland China, and American Airlines said it would suspend flights to Shanghai and Beijing from Los Angeles, citing a significant decline in demand for travel. WSJ reports.
Taken together, the airlines’ moves serve as a harbinger of more cutbacks to services to the Chinese mainland, as safety concerns rise and demand drops sharply—triggered by the virus’s rapid spread around the globe.
A plane carrying more than 200 Americans arrived on Wednesday morning at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, Calif. The passengers were screened multiple times—twice in China before being allowed to board the flight and again after the plane stopped in Anchorage, Alaska, to refuel. They will be screened again in California and temporarily housed there for a period of time, according to Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services.
In Vietnam, the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam suspended all flights to and from coronavirus-hit areas in China starting on Wednesday. VNExpress, a local media reports.
Regional airports and Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV), a state-owned company that runs 21 airports, have been ordered to allocate personnel and coordinate with local health agencies to deploy body temperature scanning equipment.
On January 23, Vietnam cancelled all flights to and from Wuhan, where the disease first broke out last December.
As of January 30, no Vietnamese has contracted the virus yet, with the two confirmed victims being Chinese nationals.
Australia, which has roughly 600 citizens in Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, said it would also evacuate its citizens and quarantine them in a detention center on remote Christmas Island, an Australian territory typically used to house asylum seekers.
According to WSJ, Several other countries, including Japan and South Korea, are also planning evacuations of their citizens.
The Chinese government is requiring airlines to offer passengers free cancellations on prebooked flights.
New cases continued to emerge around the world. The United Arab Emirates’s Health Ministry said Wednesday that a family of four visiting from Wuhan had contracted the new coronavirus, the Middle Eastern nation’s first confirmed cases.
New Zealand followed the U.S. in advising against nonessential travel to China, and Australia urged its citizens to reconsider travel to the country.
Kazakhstan, which shares a border with China, said Wednesday that it would suspend all transport links to the country in addition to stopping the issuance of entry visas to Chinese citizens over the coronavirus. Georgia was suspending all direct air traffic with China as a preventive measure, the former Soviet republic’s air traffic authority said. In Russia, all tour operators have stopped selling tours to China, including charter flights, according to Russia’s national tourism agency, Rostourism.
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